


shrike.

by thehandsingsweapon



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: M/M, fantasy meets cyberpunk, sim's halloween choose your own adventure fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-02
Updated: 2018-10-29
Packaged: 2019-07-23 17:29:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 11,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16163549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehandsingsweapon/pseuds/thehandsingsweapon
Summary: In a distant, post-apocalyptic future, Yuuri Katsuki is a Reaper in the city of New Ember -- a magical harvester, sent on dangerous treks for precious resources that exist beyond the protective walls of the city's biosphere. The dates, times, and routes for Reapings are established by a mysterious trio of clairvoyants known as Foreknowers, who in turn are hand-picked by the highest echelon of New Ember society.When his best friend Phichit Chulanont is selected to be a Foreknower, Yuuri rests assured that his upcoming harvests will be as safe as they can be.Beyond the city's shining biodome, a creature named Legend lingers in the feywild, ruminating on the fragile balance struck between the human's shining high-rises and the feral, evolved wilderness. He once sacrificed everything to make it so.He is neither good, nor safe.Nothing is, anymore.





	1. ozymandias

_'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;_

_Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'_

 

 

* * * 

>  
> 
>  
> 
> **ANNOUNCEMENT FROM THE COACHES’ CIRCLE, THE INSTITUTE, A.E. 214**
> 
> _Following an intensive evaluation process, Phichit Chulanont has been selected as the third Foreknower. Once Foreknowing services are fully reinstated, Reapings will continue on their existing schedule._

 

“They picked me, Yuuri, can you believe it?”

Phichit Chulanont has been Katsuki Yuuri’s roommate at the Institute for as long as he can remember, dating back to idyllic childhoods spent in the spotless training halls. Already the announcement has sent him whirling around their room, half-heartedly packing for his imminent transfer to the precognitive wing. It’s half work-in-progress, half-hurricane: Phichit has never been quite as organized as Yuuri is, and now his possessions are scattered all over their bunks and spread out over the floor.

“Congratulations,” Yuuri says, for what must be the third time. Being chosen as a Foreknower is an extraordinary honor; there are only three of them at any given time, and from what he understands the Circle is eager to reinstate the Trinity, which has been on hold ever since the Sending ceremony for Foreknower Bin. This will be the first time that Yuuri knows one of the Foreknowers personally, and he can’t help but wonder how it might change the Reapings to receive his briefs from a familiar, smiling face. Besides Foreknower Bin, he’s gotten instructions in the past from Foreknower Lee and Foreknower Altin, and together the three of them made for a serious, unsmiling bunch.

Now that he’s thinking about it, there must have been other Foreknowers before them, other precognitives selcting the safest parts of the Glimmer for harvest. _Before my time,_ he thinks. Their names are probably etched into the service wall at the Institute, just like Foreknower Bin’s — a mark of gratitude prior to retirement. And like Cao Bin, they’re no doubt enjoying the Edens in the upper halls of the Institute — glittering, white gardens that Yuuri has spied from afar whenever he goes up to the observation deck to look out past the biodome of New Ember. There's no part of the city that isn't beautiful; under the Institute's watch, it always flourishes, but the Edens might be the loveliest part of all, and certainly the most serene. 

If he survives enough Reapings he might someday make it to those hallowed halls, along with everyone else who, like him and Phichit, have elected to give the best years of their lives in service of New Ember, who share their skills and talents so that the city can continue to thrive inside of its biosphere, a shining beacon amidst a hostile wilderness.

“You keep saying that,” grumbles Phichit, shaking Yuuri out of his thoughts with a dour look and a sweatshirt thrown across their room. “Try and sound like you mean it, okay?”

“Sorry.” Yuuri flashes him a sheepish smile. “I’m just going to miss you,” he says. He and Phichit have come of age together in this room; Phichit was here when Yuuri was selected to be among the Reapers, and has been here waiting for him after every harrowing run out into the Glimmer for raw aether. Their room is suffused with countless memories of their time together these past few years; Yuuri’s fingers brush over the woodgrain of the desk and all he sees is his best friend, time and time again, waiting for him to come back.

It’s practically the only thing he’s ever known.

“Don’t be so morose,” Phichit chides him, and he comes over, bumping his shoulder into Yuuri’s. Like everyone else, he’s grown to be cautious of Yuuri’s hands; unlike everyone else, he doesn’t insist on gloves. “We’re going to see each other all the time. And I’ll make sure you get the best routes.”

“You better,” Yuuri murmurs, digging up half of a smile. “Now if I run into any trouble I know exactly who to complain to.”

“I would never," quips Phichit. His mock-innocence fools nobody, least of all Yuuri, but in spite of his predilection for mischief, Yuuri's glad he'll be joining the Foreknowers. Phichit, he knows, would do everything in his power to keep Yuuri out of harm's way. "I’m going to use my newly determined talents to _foreknow_ that someone else will pack this stuff up if I don’t get to it before the morning,” adds his roommate, flashing a wink. He reaches over to the nearest display screen and swipes a hand, neatly transferring the three digital pets stored there onto his wristwatch. They light up in holographic, scampering up to his shoulders.“Let’s go up to the observation deck.”

It’s Yuuri’s favorite place in all of New Ember, perhaps because it offers the clearest view of what’s beyond. Along the way, Phichit convinces him to stop for sweetened protein shakes from one of the Distillers, and even exchanges some of his credits for fresh-synthetic fruit. For some reason, Yuuri always thinks the taste of strawberries is just a little bit off, although he’s got no actual point of comparison: he’s never eaten a real strawberry in his life.

From the observation deck, the entire city shines. Its neon lights glow subtly magenta, violet, and cyan. The electric blue tones are some of Yuuri’s favorites; he’s seen videos of the ocean, has even gotten to run past a tranquil lake on one of his Reapings. His eyes linger on the azure tones of these lights the longest; they give him a feeling not unlike nostalgia.

Then, inevitably, his eyes go upwards, tracing the stars if they’re visible beyond the clear shimmer of New Ember’s biodome. He finds the moon as it passes between thin strips of clouds, some nights. Eventually his eyes settle past all of the city’s beautiful, shining sprawl. In the distance, miles and miles away, the biodome touches the earth.

Beyond that is the Glimmer.

The cities belong to the humans: safe spaces carved out of a wilderness that learned to fight back after humans far exceeded their rightful reach. The cities are protected by their biodomes, shielded from the worst the feywilds have to offer: evolved predators, psychadelic plants, unpredictable weather.

And in the wilds?

In the wilds, they say, the fey rule. In the wilds Aether has irreversibly changed the ecology of the earth; the flora and fauna once disregarded by mankind have been re-equipped to survive the volatile climate, to outlive and outlast, the fey would say, the reach of man.

Yuuri would say he’s just a dime-a-dozen Reaper, in spite of how many runs he’s completed, and he’s seen a lot of strange things on his search for resources out in the wilderness. Just a tiny amount of Aether can keep the entirety of New Ember powered for months, and more than that, every so often a Reaper comes across some priceless fragment of the world as it once was and is able to carry it back for the city's residents to admire and enjoy. This can be anything from a piece of an old car, left abandoned on a long-forgotten road, to the green carnations and blue roses that grow in the Institute's gardens. 

The carnations are beautiful, but every time Yuuri brushes his finger over the petals of a blue rose, he feels the way he feels when he’s forgotten a word, like something’s there right on the tip of his tongue, still waiting for recall.

Tonight the sky is clear. In the twilight, the Glimmer’s nothing more than the black slope of rolling hills off in the distance.

“Beautiful, huh,” Phichit hums, with a speculative slurp of the last dredges of his smoothie.Yuuri searches for the hexagonal pattern of the biodome. It’s almost wholly translucent except for this silvery spiders’ web of seams; a perfectly unique energy signature, the work of one of the Institute’s early founders.

Whoever he was, he must’ve been a genius.

 

 

***

 

 

In the feywild, the creature they call _Legend_ watches a boy with pale hair toss and turn, stretched out on a stone slab underneath the moonlight. They are alone alongside a crystalline pool, surrounded by pale white flowers and willows whose weeping vines have minds of their own, tendrils that reach and swirl regardless of the whimsy of the wind.

Because they are alone, he has no reason to speak out loud. He does so regardless, knowing there is an unannounced guest hidden in the negative spaces between shadows. Illusions have always been her strong suit. “He will wake soon,” declares Legend, whose glittering sapphire eyes glance sidelong towards the hollow space next to the trunk of the willow, shimmering with dew and a hint of its dangerous sap. Then he pointedly clears his throat, and makes it perfectly clear that he is not going to play the game of standing here, pretending to talk to himself. _“Chariot.”_

He has been watching the boy. Chariot has been watching him. She would rather he not know her name; they all would. True Names are tricky things, hard to come by. They are meant to be guarded, spoken in secret. Chariot is hers. Legend isn’t his.

_So he’s not going to die, then._

“Don’t sound so disappointed, Mila.” He reverts to an easy smile and rises with preternatural grace. The smile is all teeth; razorsharp and predatory. Everything about him is sharp and stark: the high, fine cheekbones; the crystalline cold of his eyes; the tapered points of his nails.

Legend is as beautiful as he is dangerous, with hair that shines like starlight.

She sighs and steps out of the illusory field. The nickname sounds better on the air than its alternative, safer, somehow — as safe one can be, she supposes, with Legend, whose moods can be as fickle as the skies.

And yet he’s been here for days, ever since they discovered the boy out in the wilderness.

She looks at the child again. He is sweaty and pale, and every so often he opens his parched lips to release a broken, drawn-out moan. She thinks perhaps death would be kinder. The fever has soaked and stained his clothes — strange, white robes she’s never seen before, not even on the few runners the humans send out from the cities periodically to harvest Aether from the woods. _Those_ ones are always equipped and camouflaged to the best of their ability, though such protections are laughably useless. Legend has tolerated their presence for many years, and only slits a throat every so often, when the runners become too frequent, the harvests too ambitious.

When he has a point to make.

Some would say Legend always has a point to make, so perhaps the absence of a body is also a statement.

She does not pretend to understand the choices he makes.

“It’s the drugs,” he says. “He’s almost off of them.”

Mila does not know what this word means, _drugs,_ and so Legend closes his eyes and projects it for her in images she understands: in belladonna and poppy, peyote and betel nut. He lingers longest on the compounds that came with the sundering of the veil, new evolutions for which humans once lacked the proper names.

She shudders. Mila loves a good poison, proper ones, that is: the sort that do their work neatly and effectively, undetectable, painless. This is something different.

An erasure, she thinks. That’s what it is. A compound that empties a body of its true self to let something else be poured in its stead.

“Not quite,” says Legend. He sounds bored, and for a moment, he looks it, too: she sees, for only an instant, the hollows under his eyes, and a brief, uncharacteristic dullness. “They use it to induce clairvoyance.”

“Do you know his name?”

 _His name is Yuri Plisetsky,_ thinks the creature who was once Dr. Victor Nikiforov. _He was a Foreknower before he escaped the Institute and ran into the Glimmer three weeks ago._

The title of Foreknower is another one of those words which will mean nothing to her. Legend studies the boy again. By all rights he ought to be dead. He considered doing the deed himself, except for the way Plisetsky had crashed right into him in the wilderness, and seized upon his wrists, and said three words which gave Legend pause:

 _“Eros,”_ he’d said, adamant, his eyes so dilated that nearly all Legend saw was the black of his pupils and a tiny, tiny ring of toxic citrine green. _“Eros is coming.”_

“I do,” says Legend. _Knowing_ is what he does. “But you can call him Agape.”

“That’s not the same thing,” mutters Chariot.

“No,” agrees Legend.In front of them an elder-deer has come to the pond to drink, and pale, lightning-white energy flickers and sparks along its sharp horns. But they are not the things which it has evolved to kill, and it will not strike the boy, as he lays enveloped in the cold, metallic hum of Legend's aura. Humans were a disease once, for which sundering the veil had been the only cure. Now, Legend thinks, the ecosystem’s in balance. Now there exist mutations like this one, evolved to put the food chain back into equilibrium.

It had been his life's work once, to care.

“No, it is not.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter title / quote combination comes from the poem [ozymandias,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias) by shelley.


	2. falconer

 

_And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,_

_Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?_

 

  

 

* * *

 

 

 

Yuuri gets notice for an upcoming Reaping just two weeks after Phichit joins the Foreknowers. He’s passed the time in a kind of strange, liminal space; the Institute doesn’t give him a new roommate and there’s nothing to do without having a harvest to plan: no maps of the wilderness to consider, or weather forecasts to inspect for anomalies. Instead, he checks himself out of headquarters between curfews and wanders the streets of New Ember, keeping his gloved hands firmly inside of the pockets of the sleek, gray peacoat that marks him as one of the Institute’s own.

It always makes his gift crawl underneath his skin, begging for release. _Touch,_ it whispers. Out here, in the bright lights of the city, surrounded by millions of people, the paths which his psychometry might leap down at at a single brush are infinite, spinning out in a never-ending, crystalline fractal. It’s not as interesting, reining it in, but it is _safer;_ keeps Yuuri on a routine that is predictable and stable and which never makes him feel overwhelmed by the rush of information which would no doubt present itself if he let his hands linger on a sparkling stair-rail or idly brushed a vendors wares.

Besides, those memories belong to other people, and whenever he touches them, he makes himself into a thief. 

> _(“Yuuri,”_ he remembers hearing once, the first time he’d ever given in to his instincts and pressed his hand to the glass on the observation deck, to see if anyone else felt how he did, about the night sky. _“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”_
> 
> Simple words. But they’d been spoken with an intimacy he was an interloper to. And even if the hint of the speaker’s voice had made him shiver, he knew it must’ve been someone long-gone, the ghost of some prior generation left imprinted on the glass.
> 
> Words meant for a different Yuri, he told himself.
> 
> Except sometimes he stands up there and feels that memory still, like a splinter lodged into the meat of his thumb. _“Yuuri.”_
> 
> A single name. Pronounced _just-so._
> 
> He hasn’t touched the glass since.)

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

He’s summoned to the Foreknowers with two of the other Reapers; one of whom is their newest, Minami Kenjirou, is bright-eyed and star-struck by Yuuri’s record-setting list of successful Reapings. “You even made it through the electrical storm of A.E. 210,” he says, “and still came back with aether and —”

“Some seeds.”

“A _eucalyptus_ seed,” Minami sighs, laying a hand over his chest. _He’s too young,_ Yuuri thinks, before he realizes that he must’ve been that young once, joining the Reapers, and just as bright-eyed about fulfilling what is, for New Ember, an essential duty that allows millions of people to continue living peaceful lives safe from the dangers posed by the feywild. “I _love_ that tree,” he adds, which makes Yuuri lift a quizzical brow. “What, you haven’t gone to see it? They planted one near the inter-city transit hub. If you stand close enough, it kind of offsets that — that lightning smell the portals leave behind. It’s getting so big!”

“I’ll check it out,” Yuuri murmurs, although he hardly ever goes to look at the portals. He feels strange standing there, watching people go to and fro as they pass through the bright, glowing rings. Portal technology is a transportation miracle only possible in this new era. _People thought they were magical once,_ he thinks, and he immediately also thinks of a rebuttal. _Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic._

They make him feel homesick, which is strange:

New Ember _is_ his home.

Together they pass under the glass archway that leads to the Trinity, and Yuuri can’t help but smile as he looks ahead to the three Foreknowers in their robes. He’s accustomed to the serious faces of Lee and Altin, stoic, unmoving, and he’s been subconsciously waiting this entire time to see how the other two handle Phichit’s mania.

“Reapers,” says Altin, who is the most senior of the bunch. Next to him, Phichit stands still in his white robes, hands folded behind his back, identical to Seung-gil’s posture in almost every respect. _He always was a good actor,_ Yuuri thinks. He gives Phichit credit for that — for sticking to the ceremony, the ritual. _Probably doesn’t want to mess this first go up._

“There is a Reaping to be undertaken at dawn,” Seung-gil says. Beside him, Yuuri senses Reaper Ji flinch. Kenjirou is not so practiced — he gasps, and looks wide-eyed to Yuuri, who feels strangely numb to the startling announcement.

Prompted by Kenjirou’s evident fear, he makes a half-hearted attempt to object, even as Phichit moves over to the round, holographic table nearby and activates it so that it projects New Ember and all of the surrounding wilds. “Tomorrow morning,” he echoes. “That’s very little time to prepare.”

_Phichit will back me, surely,_ he thinks. Except Phichit simply looks up at him, his black eyes flat. “Are you questioning the wisdom of the Foreknowers?” He inquires, tonelessly.

Yuuri’s gift roars to life under his skin, demanding answers, and in his pockets he clenches his fists so tightly that he can feel his nails through the fabric. “Of course not. Just wondering if alternatives were considered.”

It is Foreknower Lee who looks at him now. “There are no alternatives,” says Lee.

Phichit tilts his head just a little bit. It’s an echo of the Phichit he knows, but only just.

Like watching something else live in Phichit’s skin.

Beneath the increasing buzz of his own anxiety, simmering to life, and making it harder and harder to breathe, Yuuri hears the voice that is Phichit’s, and isn’t, say this:

“It must be tomorrow.”

“Yes,” says another.

They are, all of them, indistinguishable from each other.

One organism.

Phichit is lost to him, here. “There can be no other time.”

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Yuri Plisetsky wakes up to the sound of rushing water and a raging, roaring headache. _Fuck,_ he thinks, and then his thoughts coalesce and strengthen around that single word. This in and of itself is a marvel, a miracle. He recognizes _himself._ He exists, once again, separately from an endless spiderweb of possibilities and probabilities, drawn back from the river of time that every Foreknower gets irrevocably lost in.

“Fuck,” he groans, and then he says it again, and again, and again. His fingers tingle and his whole body aches but he is, once again, essentially himself.

“I heard you the first time,” says someone else.

Something different.

Yuri tries to open his eyes and immediately regrets it. It’s nighttime, wherever he is, but even that is too much light: a waxing moon gleams overhead, and cerulean, bioluminescent light makes the pool he’s lying next to glow. Overhead the leaves of a willow tree waver in sinuous asynchronosity, each branch with a mind of its own. The effect is strangely hypnotic.

“It is,” says the stranger, from the direction of a tree trunk which Yuri knows must be there but cannot see. “Hypnotic.” _A defense mechanism,_ thinks Legend, in Victor Nikiforov’s voice. _The rate of evolution in response to the climate catastrophe is astonishing._  

 

> (He hears something else, too: _Magical, perhaps._
> 
> _I don’t believe in magic._
> 
> These are the things he tries not to remember. _A shame._ )

The Foreknower tests his voice again. The words are slow to come. He feels parched, wrung-out. Yuri Plisetsky has never been sick in his life, but he has feelings and memories to associate with the word now. “Did I say that out loud?”

“Close enough,” says Legend. The words themselves articulate his shark-toothed smile, although he keeps it veiled behind the thin press of his lips. He waits for a moment; out in the feywild, things howl and hoot in the distance. The wind stirs the trees. “Who is Eros?”

Tired of having a conversation with someone he cannot see, Yuri tries to sit up. It takes three attempts to manage to roll over onto his stomach, and two more to gather enough strength in his arms to push himself up. The figure silhouetted underneath the trees has haunted the edges of his dreams for some time; possibilities he has probed and plunged into and chased at length to get to where he is now. “Let’s not insult both of our intelligences,” he mutters. Every one of his bones creaks in protest as he tries to stretch. Meanwhile, the other man’s eyes narrow. Another creature would rethink insolence as a strategy, but insolence requires a certain gravity of self, and is a luxury Yuri Plisetsky has not been able to afford since he became the youngest Foreknower in history. “It’s the name you’re going to give him,” he says.

_I have already given him that name,_ Legend thinks. But he does not make a habit of giving away his secrets, even though he has far too many, and is weary of carrying them.

“How long have I been out?” Asks the boy. Time has not mattered to Legend for several centuries, and so he steps out from under the willow’s protective cover and looks up at the moon to roll back its phases in his mind’s eye. “A few weeks.”

“You need to be specific,” Yuri grunts, grinding his teeth against the fresh onslaught of migraine and withdrawal. Protecting him is an independent, stubborn streak, and the fierce determination that the only way out is through. There was only one thread that led to his objective, and he must follow it precisely, or else all will be lost. The fey creature he has been discovered by does not need to know that, although now that he’s stepped out into the moonlight Yuri thinks he can nearly peel back the layers.

Legend clucks his tongue against his teeth. “Sixteen since you ran into me,” he acknowledges finally.

“Fuck,” says Yuri. He is not strong enough yet for this. Already he can feel sleep encroaching; this weakness that is entirely foreign to him. “Tomorrow,” he says, and resists the urge to waver. “He’s coming tomorrow.”

“Reapers come all the time,” Legend says, examining the sharp points of his nails. “So long as they harvest no more than what the wilds can renew, what business is it of mine?”

Victor Nikiforov once threw the world into chaos.

From it, Legend established the equilibrium that allows it to survive now, forever poised on the equinox between glory and gloom.

If Yuri ever foresaw this conversation, he can no longer remember the details. He lacks the patience to equivocate. He does not have the luxury of it. “What they’re doing to him is tantamount to slavery,” he snarls, as the thin threads of his temper — his glorious temper, his fury, all his own — snap. “How can you pretend to stand there and not give a shit?” He has _seen_ it. Not all of it — a Foreknower’s grasp on time does not allow him to delve as deeply into the past as Yuri would have liked, and so he has only grasped at the straws of their origins, Reaper Katsuki and this, this _thing_ — through conversations held in one of many possible futures, out here in the wilderness.

“You love him,” he hisses. He hurls the words like an accusation and tries to force his eyes to focus. The world tilts on its axis. “You _love_ him,” he insists. “And he loves you. I’ve seen it.”

The last thing he feels before he sinks into unconsciousness are receding claws agains the back of his neck. Legend has spared him a drop-faint back into the rock’s smooth surface.

_What I did was worse,_ Legend thinks, once the boy has succumbed to his symptoms once more. _Far worse._

He watches the Foreknower sleep. The illness has made him look fragile, but under the moonlight, unconscious, far from dreams, he also looks cherubic. “You’re just a child,” he murmurs. _A child who fought off the Foreknowing drugs to run all the way here._

He wonders if Yuuri still looks the same. Legend remembers thinking his eyes sometimes looked like they were threaded with some precious metal.

When it occurs to him, suddenly, that he can no longer recall whether it seemed copper or gold, he looks at the boy again, and in the private recesses of a locked-down heart, he also wonders at the great and terrible accuracy of Plisetsky’s words:

_You love him._

_He loves you._

 

Present-tense.

Enduring.

Possibly eternal.

_What did you see?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's poem reference is from _The Second Coming_ by [Yeats.](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming) The _sufficiently advanced technology_ quote is a reference to [Clarke's three laws.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws)


	3. crake

_Nature is to zoos as God is to churches._  

 

 

* * *

 

 

There is nothing quite like the opening of a harvest, Yuuri thinks, as he stands at the border of New Ember with the two other Reapers assigned to the run. They are gathered at the farthest reach of the residential districts, and he takes the opportunity to study the silvery, opaque energy signature of the protective biosphere which separates New Ember from the feywild. Up close like this, its hexagonal patterns are more clear, though he can no more completely comprehend them than he could back in the glittering towers of the Institute at the center of the city. Here, the patterns of silver woven into the translucent dome are more organic and wild, and their hexagonal pattern arcs like snowflakes, each one unique and distinct. It reminds him of a trinket he discovered once on a ruined run through a long-lost village: a clear child’s toy, featuring a castle inside of a bubble. He remembers shaking it to eliminate a layer of dust, and watching the marvel of snow and glitter follow.

The word comes to him slowly, like a distant memory. _Snowglobe._

The Foreknowers have given each Reaper a unique path through the wilderness to each of their suspected gathering points. In his many Reapings, Yuuri has traversed most of the countryside surrounding New Ember, even if it seems to evolve and twist in upon itself at an astonishing rate. He recognizes his endpoint: a razored canyon of crystalline rock.

As is tradition, members of the Coaches’ Circle has come to oversee the breaching of the biodome. Yuuri hardly ever exchanges words with the leaders of the Institute; he merely exchanges a nod with Karpisek and Cialdini before they give the instructions of the routine. Yuuri hears Kenjirou repeating the words under his breath, as if to reinforce his chances of returning. The horizon is already glowing with a thin sliver of pink, promising sunrise soon. _We will reinstall the gate at 20:00 and leave it open for exactly ten minutes. If you are late, the Circle cannot promise to breach the biosphere to allow your return to the city._ It’s a scary prospect: each Reaper has a survivalist’s kit, full of mundane things like climber’s kits and boosters. The kit also contains an oxygen tank and a gas mask — but just the one set. Any more would be too heavy for short-term expeditioning out into a wilderness that changes mood, weather, and atmosphere as often as Phichit used to flip through the entertainment stations on their digi-wall back in Yuuri’s flat.

 _Phichit._ He remembers, suddenly, the blankness of Phichit’s stare, and looks to Celestino, who has, from time to time, deigned to speak with Yuuri or Phichit when passing through the Institute’s lower floors. “Is Foreknower Chulanont well?” He asks the big, broad-shouldered man, once Karpisek turns to install the breaching device into the city’s protective shield.

Celestino tilts his head, contemplative. If he minds the interruption, it doesn’t show underneath his oversized smile. “Reaper Katsuki. Foreknower Chulanont selected your route himself.”

Later, Yuuri will realize this is not answer to the question he asked.

Then the gate is open: a glittery hole punched into the sphere that keeps them all safe. Kenjirou looks at Yuuri one last time, and wishes him luck, and after that the three of them pour out into the wilderness.

Yuuri’s route takes him up the steepest path into the mountains to the West of New Ember, darting quickly away from the distant coast and into the hills. He takes advantage of dimly-lit dawn to work his way into the trees quickly, in the hours before the forest wakes. It seems, generally, to be springtime, although he steers clear of countless groves with trees covered in radiant, sweet-smelling flowers of all shades. In all the old stories, these flowers are messages of love, but no longer: beauty has become dangerous. Most pollens are toxic now, and even if all Reapers are inoculated against their dangers, he’d rather not take his chances. Other pockets of the woods shimmer in streaks of light, revealing slivers of other seasons: places where the leaves are turning and falling, or where the summer sun shines bright — time disruptions that he studiously avoids. _What’s your favorite season,_ Phichit had wanted to know once. The biosphere regulates seasons in New Ember; only the Reapers have real experience with the word. For Yuuri, it’s the stark clarity of winter, trees dusted with snow, the forest still and silent. But he won’t run into those circles now; there’s a legend among the Reapers that an early researcher at the Institute walked straight into one of the winter rifts, disappeared into the snow, and was lost for years.

He crests a jagged hill and immediately descends into the ravine which will carry him into the crystal canyon. The liquid that splashes around his boots is faintly luminescent: water carrying micro-organisms that the city takes great care to filter in order to render it drinkable. Yuuri’s chest aches, but he tells himself to press on — he’ll take a break, perhaps, at the mouth of the crystal canyon, if he can find shelter. Not for the first time, he’s grateful for his own training regimen: runs through New Ember’s labyrinth of streets, and workouts that he hates but does anyway because the habit of them is engrained in him like clockwork. Slowly the rock formations change, showcasing growth of quartz and clusters of razor-sharp rock. There are minerals here whose names he doesn’t know because they appeared with the rest of the feywild years ago — suddenly and all at once — and there is no parley with the fey. They — and every other living creature on earth — have seemingly decided that humans had enough to say in the nuclear era. A small sliver of Yuuri sympathizes. This new earth that’s been formed out of the collision of realities is beautiful and feral and, perhaps most importantly, humans will never be able to conquer it, because it changes faster than they do.

He stops at one of the mouths to the canyon, catching his breath, when he sees it: a sleek shadow, flickering onto an overhang of shining, dark stone. _Shit._ The panther is sleek and iridescent, and Yuuri sees only one blink of its four eyes before it suddenly appears closer.

So much for his break: he glances down at the mapping device on his wrist, only barely functioning thanks to ever-present interference in the wilderness, and takes off at a dead sprint for his quarry.

> ( _“What’s it like, an aether-spring?”_ Phichit asked him once.
> 
> _“They’re beautiful,”_ Yuuri said.)

The game of cat-and-mouse continues for a mile, maybe two. Yuuri stumbles and darts over sharp rocks that cut into his gear as he passes. Around him veins of gold and silver begin to streak through the rock, veins of something so precious that just a tiny amount of it keeps all of New Ember running from one Reaping to the next.

Something grazes his cheek as he runs, leaving a deep gash which stings furiously. Ahead, Yuuri sees it: the glittering and glowing crystals where the aether-spring has bubbled up, and the floating, shimmering stones which he’s been sent to retrieve. The canyon’s floor has been rendered translucent by the aether pooling underneath it, and under its crystalline surface, he can see the shimmering, rushing liquid as it pushes up towards a single pore in the center of the jagged array of minerals that have formed around the spring. What happens there defies ordinary physics: in the air, the metallic liquid immediately forms shimmering, almost infinitely-faceted shapes, which steadily rise into the atmosphere. Left to this rising, the aether eventually disippates in the atmosphere, dispersing something Yuuri has only ever managed to think of as raw, wild magic back into wild, spurring on its ever-shifting, ever-changing nature.

The panther is much too close. _Shit, shit, shit. Improvise, Yuuri._ He’s got his oxygen, and some flares, and a climbing kit he hasn’t had the time to make use of. _Flare,_ Yuuri thinks, slinging his bag around to his front as he runs.

He’ll only have the one chance.

He slides into the clearing, stumbles, falls, and rolls onto his back just as the cat leaps.

So does something else, though: something humanoid, spreading its arms, blocking out the sun.

 _“Leave,”_ snarls a voice Yuuri recognizes but can’t place.

The single word makes the panther blink out of its array of attack instantly.

Panic rises in Yuuri’s throat and seizes his chest: in all of his runs, he’s never seen one of these creatures of legend, the beings who re-shaped the world into the only reality he’s ever known.

 _Fey,_ he thinks. _One of the fey._

He doesn’t have time to think about it, because something even more bewildering happens — a slim blonde human carefully slides down the rock and joins them on the spring’s floor. The boy looks malnourished and weak, but his green eyes are piercing, and hauntingly familiar.

He wears in the robes of a Foreknower. “Katsudon,” he grunts, familiar and disparging all at once, which makes even less sense. Yuuri is certain they’ve never met. Then he looks towards the fey creature whose intervention in this space is impossible to understand. “Destroy his tracker.”

 _They’re going to kill me,_ Yuuri thinks, and he scrambles to his feet in a blind panic, prepares himself to fight. In front of him, the fey turns, revealing the most striking face he’s ever seen: starlight hair and aquamarine eyes.

“Don’t —” Legend warns, seconds too late. The pain of this moment is exquisite, Victor thinks, as Yuuri — _Yuuri_ — rushes to punch him. _I don’t want to hurt you,_ he thinks, but it turns out that Yuuri is even more agile and dangerous than he has allowed himself to remember, and soon he’s having to evade attacks and respond to them in earnest. Yuuri fights like a dancer, with the terrible, casual grace that Victor always admired, and improvises in all kinds of ways that are inadvisable and shouldn’t work, except for the ways in which they unexpectedly do.

Victor ought to know. _I taught you this,_ he thinks, and a miserable laugh breaks out of his chest. He knows the steps of this dance too well: the interplay of kicks and punches, of darting feints and brutal attacks. It comes back to him quickly, but the wild joy of it, of old training sessions, makes him inclined to let the moment stretch.

Plisetsky has no patience for the game and ruins it by cheating: he watches and waits for his one opportunity, and shoves Yuuri suddenly, forcing him to stumble directly into Legend. For this, Legend hisses at him, but he grabs the device anyway, ripping it from Yuuri’s wrist.

Victor crushes the device in his hand just as Yuuri’s hand closes around his wrist.

Then and only then does he realize: Yuuri is wearing climber’s gloves — cut off at the knuckles to leave his fingertips exposed. _Of course,_ Legend thinks. His own nails are sharp, now and the company he keeps now never bothers to obfuscate their magic; he long ago forgot to consider such matters.

He sucks in a breath and closes his eyes against the thing he cannot stop and then the memory is ripped out of him, swallowed up by Yuuri’s blessed, ever-hungry hands.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

> “How is the decontamination of Sector 8 coming?” Victor Nikiforov inquires. He stands calm and steady in the center of chaos; the Institute’s lab is being constructed around him, and so is the organization of a city which is being rebuilt now out of the ruined-climate wastes, after years of war and an unsteady, fragile peace which has come at far too high of a price.
> 
> They say he is a genius. Huddled in the reaches of the place that will someday become New Ember, thousands of people are alive, they say, because of his work. Victor is the protege of Yakov Feltsman, renown for retrieving the last download of the grid before it went dark, and together they are stewards of one of only a handful of final libraries of human knowledge. They carefully gather and steward resources, and in this place, at least, electricity hums for long enough to make progress possible.
> 
> It is much too fragile for Victor’s liking; the world has gone mad and power is an impossible resource, ever-dwindling, and in all of his energy work he’s yet to find anything that can sustain for the long-term in the middle of what is becoming an increasingly hostile, volatile environment.
> 
> “Not as fast as we’d like,” admits Popovich, who’s delivering this morning’s update. “There are anomalies in the woods none of our models have been able to explain yet. Coach Feltsman requested an expert from the Hasetsu circle to come consult and that cohort has been making the trip here for over a month.”
> 
> “Hasetsu? Wasn’t it completely destroyed?”
> 
> “A few of us survived,” says Katsuki Yuuri. He is only somewhat adjacent to a grim-looking Okukawa Minako, who has already begun to help herself to Victor’s lab.
> 
> In Victor Nikiforov’s memories, Yuuri has a shy smile and earnest eyes, but what makes him interesting is the way he doesn’t shrink from Victor’s gaze when Victor turns to look at him — he stares back, resolute, even as a subtle flush spreads across his cheeks and dots the tips of his ears red.
> 
> “Who are you?”
> 
> “I’m Katsuki Yuuri. Paraphysicist.” He has beautiful eyes, Victor realizes. They’re dark as ebony, and rust-flecked, too, and Victor cuts himself off from staring by examining the rest the Hasetsu cohort — just two women, both of them seemingly older. Besides, Yuuri has already turned to Georgi to ask to inspect his results.
> 
> In Victor’s memories, time shifts; Yuuri and Minako become fixtures in the lab, along with the woman whom Victor learns is Yuuri’s sister. Around them, a city that can’t last continues to be built, because even now, at the end of all things, none of them knows how to admit defeat.
> 
> “Magical, perhaps,” Yuuri posits one day, looking at the results from Sector 8. He always wears gloves, which never fails to make Victor wonder what his hands really look like.
> 
> “I don’t believe in magic,” says Victor.
> 
> Yuuri studies him, his lips pressed into a thin line.
> 
> He is not the only person who ever studies Victor.
> 
> He is simply the only one who ever makes progress.
> 
> “Shame.”

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Legend’s voice is sharp as knives, each word a falling dagger:

_Don’t_

_You_

**_Ever_ **

_Touch_

_Me._

Yuuri barely registers the sharp, clawed hands which shove him away; he is too preoccupied with staccato gasps for breath, with the assault this — this memory — has done on his entire person. Never has his gift uncovered something this potent, ripped into it in this fashion.

Never has he been more certain that what he sees is real.

And yet —

 _It’s impossible,_ he thinks.

The atomic era was hundreds of years ago.

New Ember was founded —

He was —

_Impossible._

_Impossible?_ A question. A call.

 _Improbable,_ something whispers, something else long-lost.

The entire world tilts.

The last thing Katsuki Yuuri hears as he faints is the Foreknower’s voice:

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Today's chapter inspiration is from Margaret Atwood's _Oryx and Crake_ because I am a predictable bitch in regards to my inspirations. And we have a hint of Sherlock Homes: _When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth._


	4. dog & wolf

_howling dog & wolf illusions wild rage_

_we had a Seder & tried to remember the plagues_

_the dwarfs the deadly sins the seven  
_

_people you should never sleep with_

_the rose inside the rose my artful spring bouquet_

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Yuuri comes to suddenly and all at once, snapped into wakefulness by biting, ferocious cold. As he blinks and reaches to rub his hands together, leaves come into focus above him — the hypnotic, slow twist of an anodyne willow, its branches dusted with silvery frost. Facts rush back at him all at once: he is out on a Reaping. He has been interrupted. One of the fey — _Victor?_ The creature both is and is not the same person as the memories which leapt from his skin — has destroyed Yuuri’s tracker. Perhaps most immediately important, it isn’t supposed to be winter. “No,” he mumbles, and sits up with increasing urgency. _No no no._ The city’s biosphere must have been shut already, who knows how long ago, even. _No._

His breath hitches as the fey stranger slides into view, his gemstone eyes calculating and narrowed, at war with an expression that is pinched and pensive. “Breathe,” he recommends, but Yuuri can’t help himself: there exists, in his brain, a little gremlin named anxiety and it occasionally grabs the controls and yanks his whole being off the rails.

“You took us,” he half-wheezes, half-shouts, “into a time rift? You can’t — I’m not — someone has gone missing in one of these before and we — I can’t go home —”

It would be a mistake to think the blue eyes trained on his become suddenly softer. They are gem-bright, after all, alien. “Who told you that?” Legend asks. He curls his claws into the meat of his palm to be reminded of their sting.

It’s a strange question. Strange enough to disrupt Yuuri’s panic. Except when Yuuri thinks to answer, he can’t quite remember. His gift surges after this line of questioning, combing through memory after memory to attempt to find an origin. “It’s just a story,” he says, after a moment’s pause, “I’ve always remembered it.” Bereft of a real answer, his vindictiveness rises. “Congratulations,” he snaps. “You’ve ruined my life. When do I get to try to go back to figure out how long I have to be out in the wilderness before I _maybe_ get let back in?”

“It is the same day, still,” says Legend, a bit flatly. _Congratulations. You’ve ruined my life._ Yuuri does not know how right he is, Victor thinks. He casts a glance back at Plisetsky. “You are no prisoner,” he replies coolly. “But the Foreknower wishes to bring you into some plan he is hatching. The two of you should get on with it.”

Only after the creature has moved to stalk across the frozen, glacial surface of the nearby pond, a picture of impossible grace, does Yuuri remember the memories that had leapt to life at a single touch. “Wait,” he says, and reaches out, but Legend’s back is already turned and something in Yuuri twists, ill in a way he can’t recognize from the image retreating into the snow.

He does not have time to think about it: the young boy in the Foreknower’s robes sits down at the edge of the boulder and immediately interrupts. “So,” he says. “What’d they tell you after I got out?”

 _What._ Yuuri does his best, but he can’t make this string of words make sense. “… I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he replies, which is met with an irritable stare and a growing scowl that’s unlike any Foreknower Yuuri’s ever interacted with. They are placid, secure amongst each other and in their knowledge of the future, a chord that only plays the one note.

“What do you mean you don’t know? I’m in the Trinity. I’ve been planning your runs for a year now with Otabek and Reaper Lee.”

Yuuri frowns. “… So _you’re_ Cao Bin?”

The boy swears under his breath and then holds out his hand. _“The fucking coaches,_ ” he grumbles. It gives him a moment’s pause where he scrutinizes Yuuri. “Cao Bin was the Foreknower before me,” he adds. “… You really don’t remember me at all?”

Yuuri’s attention drifts. The pond is not very large but he sees no trace of the outsider who must’ve brought him here now. _That memory was real,_ he thinks. It shouldn’t _be_ real; it’s too old to be a part of his own life, and yet there he was, as plain as day. … _His name is Victor._ “Apparently I’ve forgotten lots of things,” he adds.

Plisetsky’s look grows calculating. “He can take us back,” he says. “I’ve Seen it. I’ve Seen him walk up to the biosphere and pull it all down.”

“Taking down the biosphere is a terrible idea. It’ll be dangerous.”

“Didn’t look too bad to me. But you’re the one who has to convince him to do it.”

“Do I have any reason to believe you other than the fact that you’re a human in the feywild and you’re wearing a Foreknower’s robes?” Yuuri asks.

In response, he’s offered a waiting, bare palm. “Go ahead,” Yuri challenges. “It’ll be faster.”

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Yuri Plisetsky is still just a child when his mother disappears into the feywild and doesn’t come back. He is too small to understand her absence at first except in the way that his memories of her grow vague and soft at the edges, until she is less and less like a real person, impossible to recall perfectly. It makes him angry enough to almost punch through one of the walls at his Grandfather’s house, one day, and afterwards he finds himself sitting and grinding his teeth together while his grandfather brushes a healing salve over his knuckles. The medication in it is less effective than it ought to be, which leaves the old man reaching for a bandage, his rough fingers drifting over Yuuri’s bruised fist, careful, cautious. Nikolai works for the Institute, which is something Yuri doesn’t understand. _How can you work for them, still,_ he says. Intellectually, he understands the necessity of Reapings, but his emotional acceptance of their necessity, of the entire system, teters constantly on the edge of a cliff. _They sent her out to die. She died out there. Alone._

 _The Foreknowers do their best to make Reapings as safe as they can be,_ Nikolai explains. Grief is carving a place in him, and he hides it from his Grandson in his endless cooking and in moments like this. _Sometimes unexpected things happen._

 _You should become a Coach,_ says Yuri. _You could make it better._

Nikolai’s laugh is rough-edged and abrupt. He has a gravely voice. Nonetheless, in Yuri’s memories it shines golden and glorious as a bell. _Yura, I’ll never be a Coach,_ he says, but young Yuri doesn’t ever realize why until it’s much too late.

 _Then I’m going to be a Foreknower,_ he decides. _I’m going to be the best one ever. None of them are ever going to get hurt again._

A few years later, when he is selected to replace Cao Bin, he makes history: he is the youngest Foreknower ever. They move him out of his Grandfather’s house into shared quarters. They tell him there’s a medical scan and a medication he needs to take to get used to the mental link maintained with the other two Foreknowers.

He believes them.

The drugs nearly erase him, except for the one thing none of them ever noticed: Yuri Plisetsky’s bloodied knuckles, wrapped up the old-fashioned way, and his subtle, understated gift: resistance.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

“You have no idea how much work it took,” Yuri says, as he jerks his hand free from Yuuri’s grasp. “Finding those slivers of possibilities for futures with a different system, and then keeping them hidden from Seung-gil, convincing Beka to keep his mind quiet and to help me escape.” There’s a story here that Yuuri can’t unravel or imagine — he’s never shared a consciousness with anyone else, and he can’t pretend to understand Yuri’s experiences from just one brush with his history. “The drugs alone make it nearly impossible to just be yourself.”

 _Drugs,_ Yuuri thinks slowly. It’s a lot to take in. He thinks of Phichit, expressionless and placid: host to a constructed hivemind tuned into a strange, psychic space he can’t pretend to understand. “It’s not right,” he says.

“You think it’s just us,” snorts Yuri. “Like you haven’t been under their thumb for years?” He is met with silence. Yuuri needs time and space to deliberate and knows he can’t have it; after what he’s seen, he has to act. He can’t simply stand by. He catches himself looking across the pond again, searching for the man Plisetsky believes can turn New Ember upside down. “I’ve Seen him introduce you as _Eros_ to other fey, some time in the future,” Yuri murmurs. “… Do you know why?”

“No,” says Yuuri, who stands up. He hopes the ice is stable. “But I’m going to find out.”

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

The path across the pond is treacherous; Victor made it look simple, but Yuuri is conscious of the ice shifting under his weight and faint pops that threaten to crack. Intuitively, he thinks perhaps the danger is part of the point. And sure enough, as he nears the pond’s center, he feels like he’s being watched and turns his head ever so slightly to see _Victor_ standing underneath a different tree.

“You should be more careful,” Legend cautions. _Careful,_ like Yuuri has ever been careful with himself, like beneath all his layers of anxiety and artifice there isn’t a part of Yuuri that thrills and hungers for the challenge the feywild offers him.

Defiant, Yuuri takes another step. “I need to know the things you know,” he says, forcing a calm he does not feel into his voice. The pond creaks in response, and he thinks he sees one of Victor’s hands twitch in response.

“Humans used to believe in reincarnation,” he suggests. It’s a non-answer.

“ _You_ used to be human,” Yuuri says.

For a moment, Legend considers lying. _If you were anyone else,_ he thinks. Of course, that is the crux of the whole issue; Yuuri is himself. He is already better than the thing that has lived on in Legend’s pathetic memories: he is flesh and blood, he is real, he is flawed, he is ten thousand time superior to the echo Legend has only very rarely allowed himself to imagine, all this time. “Yes.”

Yuuri stares at him, incredulous. “Reincarnation,” he says, tonelessly, flatly. It is not a hypothesis he buys; his gift is hungry and yanks echoes of the past from everything that surrounds him, but never has it reached into past lives or alternate histories. Whatever he has seen is part of Victor’s story, a living, still-onging story.

“… I did not really think,” Legend tries. The words come in starts and stops, and tie his silver tongue into knots. _I did not think you would still be alive_ is not the right answer. There is nothing that happens in the feywild that he does not know. “I did not …. expect you to be _you_ ,” he finishes. Even as he says the words, guilt curls. He imagines _Mother_ ’s silver, wild laughter, cold and sharp. _Whose fault is that, Victor Nikiforov?_

“I need to know what you know,” Yuuri protests.

“I am not ready.”

“I don’t care,” says Yuuri, which surprises Victor enough that he looks up. He ought to have known better. _You were always a surprise,_ he thinks. Yuuri Katsuki is a never-ending chemical reaction forever startling Victor Nikiforov’s synapses. Victor closes his eyes against the wildfire Yuuri lit in him once, the thing which has never burned out. “It’s _my_ life,” Yuuri says. He is at the shore now. Safe and yet not. “I have a right to know.”

Legend moves as swiftly as a viper, in front of the Reaper suddenly with fierce, preternatural grace. The fingers of one hand curl underneath Yuuri’s chin, leaving faint pinpricks of his nails, meant to be a warning but far too carefully placed to successfully convey danger. Victor’s other hand curls around his wrist. He watches Yuuri’s adam’s apple bob as he turns his hands over, and Victor steadies himself for what this brush of fingers will rip out of him next.

He is not disappointed; it’s the two of them, together in every possible sense. In Victor Nikiforov’s memories, he drizzles kisses around the bared, beautiful arch of Yuuri’s spine. It is either very, very late, or very, very early: the light coming through a broken window in the distance is grey with pre-dawn. They are beautiful and nonsensical together, making promises they cannot possibly hope to keep. _Stay close to me,_ they whisper between kisses. _Don’t ever leave._

 _I would never,_ Yuuri promises him. There’s a strange band on his wrist, and it beeps suddenly with a countdown that gives them both pause. The world stands still as it processes an injection; Victor’s gaze is locked on the gauge as it resets. _Hey,_ says Yuuri, drawing his attention back. His fingers feather along the edge of Victor’s jaw, bared, hungry. _I love you._

Victor’s gaze is immeasurably soft, and he shifts until Yuuri straddles his lap, until they’re twined face-to-face, until he can press his response directly into Yuuri’s kiss-bitten mouth. _I love you too._

In the present, Yuuri wavers on his feet again, and Legend jerks his hands away, pushing Yuuri back into the bark of a nearby elderwood to keep him upright.

Yuuri stares at him and attempts to process a maelstrom constructed out of a thousand different emotions, a tapestry coming together out of attraction and heartache. Out of it the only thing he can construct is the absolute certainty that he has lost something somewhere that is too valuable to even give a name to.

“Be careful what you wish for,” Legend warns him.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Back in New Ember, Kenjirou Minami is staring open-mouthed at the two Coaches who have come to seal the gate in the biosphere. Lilia Baranovskaya’s face betrays nothing, but Feltsman looks at least a little irritated by the fact that Katsuki hasn’t returned at the end of the Reaping. “He’s coming back,” Kenjirou Minami insists, his fists clenched. “Just. Just wait. Five more minutes. He’ll be back. He always comes back.”

“Close the gate,” Yakov says, and he ignores Kenjirou’s shouts of protest as LIlia moves to make it so. Nearby the Trinity of Foreknowers stand aloof and all-knowing, all-knowing _except_ for this.

 _Unless they knew,_ a treacherous voice insists. It is treacherous because everyone knows the Foreknowers cannot predict absolutely everything. There are always too many variables to account for. They do their best against impossible odds _. Maybe they knew and they sent him anyway._

It makes something in Kenjirou snap. He launches himself at Chulanont, furious. “You bastard,” he shouts, and cracks Phichit with a strong punch across the jaw before strong, stoic arms hold him back. Altin. Of _course_ it’s Altin.

“You were his friend! He trusted you!”

Foreknower Chulanont rubs at his jaw. The three of them exchange a look too complex for Minami to decode, and Altin sets him on his feet and pushes him back in the direction of the Institute. “Go home, Reaper Minami,” he insists tonelessly. “You know the rules.”

“He trusted you,” Kenjirou insists again. But on the way home he gets a strange feeling, like perhaps Altin was about to say something else.

_What if they knew?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter's poem / title combo comes from no. 98 in the sonnet section of kim addonizio's _mortal trash._


	5. lethe

_To live in this world_

_you must be able_   
_to do three things:_   
_to love what is mortal;_   
_to hold it_

_against your bones knowing_   
_your own life depends on it;_   
_and, when the time comes to let it go,_   
_to let it go._

[ Mary Oliver, excerpt, "In Blackwater Woods" ]

 

 

 

* * * 

 

 

 

At first, Victor Nikiforov finds Katsuki Yuuri a little bit annoying, primarily because he seems to flit between half a dozen different contradictions at once. Victor discovers that he is wickedly smart, clever, determined, but also equally determined to insist that his intellect is an accident, nothing special, that his observations mean absolutely nothing. Similarly, he is a scientist and somehow also _not_ a scientist; Victor has always studied the physical world and grasped its logical constraints intuitively, almost too-easily, even, but Yuuri is interested in metaphysics and things that are disproven more often than they’re ever shown to be objective fact. _Not that it matters much,_ he tells Victor, once, reflecting on his studies in philosophy and religion. _What does any of it matter when the whole world’s still burning?_

It takes a while for Victor to realize that the way Yuuri comes back into his thoughts from time to time isn’t merely a scratch in the record, a neat little undoing of Victor’s wreck of a life. By the time he recognizes intrigue for what it is, and begins to come to terms with his own fascination, it’s too late. In the future, Legend will contemplate a branch of mathematics Yakov once explained to him, and deterministic chaos, and wonder whether or not it might have been better if they’d never met at all.

Yuuri, combing through this memory with a bone-tight grip on his wrist sees something Victor did not at the time: a reticence in himself. He catches the way his eyes linger on Victor, thoughtfully, recognizes his own fear.

This other version of him is hiding something, he thinks. He has a secret.

They fall in love slowly and somehow all at once. It’s a stressful time; the city is in tatters, the volatile weather and the constant risk of catastrophe grate on everyone’s nerves. Yuuri flickers in and out of Victor’s memories like a candle, never present for more than a few hours at a time. Some days he looks a little worse for the wear, and some days Victor does, too. They’re out in the field, trying to trace the strange energy signals coming from Sector 8, when things first come to a head.

_Beep. Beep. Beep._

Victor, leading a cluster of investigators, freezes and turns around slowly to place the sound. His expression flickers first with disbelief and then something else entirely as Yuuri freezes in the weight of his gaze. Yuuri moves more slowly than he should to roll up his sleeves, his fingers unexpectedly clumsy, and processes an injection into the bed of veins at his wrist. It dispenses the medication that keeps him from death’s door, for now. The compound is impossible to find, harder still to produce, and with every dose of it, Yuuri borrows more time. 

“You have radiation poisoning,” Victor says, nearly at a whisper. There are six other people with them to witness the moment as it shatters, but the conversation is only meant for two.

“Hasetsu,” Yuuri replies, trying and failing to make a sardonic smile stretch the corners of his mouth. The earthquake took almost everything; even Mari and Minako suffer a little bit from the sickness, albeit not nearly so badly as he does — they’d both been at work, and significantly further away from the reactor when it inevitably gave out.

This is the moment when Victor realizes he’s _hopelessly_   _attached._

Later, he tells Yuuri he wants to show him something, and together they climb the fire escape of a dilapidated, six-story building. The sky is clear for the first time in a very long time; the stars twinkle down, light transmitted millions of years earlier, before everything went wrong. “Your parents didn’t make it.” Victor murmurs, after a long pause. It isn’t a question.

“My mother made me take all of her doses with us,” Yuuri says. He swallows, and with it re-compartmentalizes the grenade of his grief. “She said — she said she was already plenty old. Mari had heard that maybe Feltsman was able to reassemble some data, so …”

_So we came here._

Victor’s family is all gone, too; everything in St. Petersburg is. He says as much, and then he wonders again at the difference between them. He has compartmentalized all of the trauma of the war, such a petty, trivial thing, in hindsight, fought over rising oceans and eliminated resources. His parents are just a blip in the millions of dead. He has attached himself to the act of rebuilding, and every time he catches himself hollowed out with his own grief, he rededicates himself to the effort. He is determined to make the loss meaningful somehow, but he never lets it show. 

Conversely, Yuuri wears his heart on his sleeve; his feelings are plainly evident in his face, and not for the first time, Victor thinks that he must have a beautiful, crystalline heart. “Yuuri, I —”

He's interrupted by Yuuri's palm, clamped over his mouth. “Don’t,” Yuuri warns him. Sympathy is not what he wants. They stand there, too close, borderline staring. It lasts for just one second longer, maybe two, and then Yuuri has dropped his arm, and gotten a fistful of Victor’s worn-out peacoat, and dragged him in for a kiss. “Don’t,” he repeats, again, as they come apart, except this time it sounds like a warning.

They stay on the roof for a long time. Long enough that Victor hears the band beep again. _Don’t let yourself think you can have this forever,_ it cautions him.

He has always ignored every voice that tells him what not to do; even his own.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

They sit together but opposite in the snow; Legend with his long legs crossed, palms resting upwards on his knees, Yuuri’s hands a vice around both of his wrists.

“You look like you might cry,” Yuuri tells him, suddenly, a little tersely, the way he’s always sounded when he’s put-out over something or Victor’s done the wrong thing. Victor can’t help himself; he barks out a laugh. It doesn’t make him feel any better and it obviously doesn’t satisfy Yuuri, who reaches forward to sweep the curtain of Legend’s long hair away from his eyes. Underneath his statement is a question: _why would a happy memory make you cry,_ perhaps.

“I haven’t thought about that kiss in a long time,” Legend murmurs. It’s an obtuse way of saying that a thousand little details have slipped from his claws, like how Yuuri kissed him first, or which constellations Yuuri liked best.

Yuuri studies him, looking for the soft Victor who looked at him with such fondness in Victor’s memories, as though he might be able to chip away at the hard slope of Legend’s features or the gemstone facets of hiseyes, and rediscover the mortal buried deep beneath. _Don’t,_ Legend almost warns him, everything an echo of the rubble he made out of their past. He just barely refrains: he is still Victor Nikiforov after all, fundamentally selfish in the most strange and self-sacrificing of ways, and anyway, Yuuri will come to his own conclusions soon enough.

Already the magic is creeping back over his skin, and sweeping them back into the past.

He resigns himself to what he already knows quite well: with Yuuri, there is only ever a temporary antidote for the river Lethe.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Victor does the math, even though Yuuri tells him not to. He calculates Yuuri’s remaining doses and what backup medication they have until he can see an inevitable end. He makes a note of the date and then promises himself that he will defy the odds. Throws himself into his work. It starts with a dangerous run to a neighboring city to look for supplies, breaking into the vaults of an old pharmaceutical until they manage to unearth more of the anti-radiation medication that keeps everyone from Hasetsu alive. Then he spends his allotment of computer time, while they run on generators, reading through the notes of old experiments from Yakov. _Nanomedicine Proves Effective in Early Cancer Trials,_ he reads, and presses on through what little data has been restored off the servers until a theory crystallizes in his mind. 

It has almost no chance of success, but Victor's never let that stop him before. “I need to go to St. Petersburg,” he tells Yakov, point-blank.

“No,” says Yakov. St. Petersburg is half-submerged in rising tides and pock-marked by explosions, little more than a crumbling ruin on a coastline that keeps redrawing itself. “It’s too dangerous.”

“I’m going, Yakov,” Victor says. He will walk if he has to, across what used to be an entire country. But he looks at Yuuri and thinks that he would _prefer_ not to. “Think of what else we might get,” he wheedles. “You’ve been putting it off but you know, eventually, we’re going to need what’s there …”

Yuuri is angry with him about it, of course. It’s their first real fight. _You’re going to work yourself to death, Victor. And now you’re running halfway around the world to try to retrieve something that might not even exist anymore?_

_What would you have me do? Stay here and watch you —_

_Enjoy our time together while we have it? Yes._

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

_“I can’t do that,” Legend murmurs softly, echoing words that had once been his own, lifetimes ago. I won’t watch you die._

_“Did you find what you were looking for?” Yuuri asks._

_Legend’s smile is bitter. “You’re still here, aren’t you?” **Yes**. _

Rumaging through the destroyed city had been harrowing and dangerous; he’d keenly felt his own mortality multiple times, just as strongly as the need to rescue whatever he could from the charred carcass of what had once been the Science Academy. All that danger for five charred laptops and three melted terminals from the server room before Victor had changed tactics and gone, instead, to the laboratory, submerged under twenty feet of freezing, toxic seawater. _Victor, you can’t dive in that, it’ll kill you._

Someone, he hardly remembers who now, it doesn’t matter. _Don’t tell me what I can’t do._

It took nine different dives before he’d found them there, stored in a safe blown clean out of the vault. “Whatever it is, I hope it’s worth all this frostbite,” his counterpart — ah, yes, a Swiss researcher, Victor remembers him now.

“It will be,” says Victor, on the brink of an imminent collapse. “You’ll see.” Later, after Christophe has found a safe pocket of the building to tuck them into, and started a fire, and is desperately trying to keep Victor awake, Victor makes himself recite the things he remembers. _Swallow the surgeon. Feynman, giving his Plenty of Room at the Bottom talk. He thought we’d be rearranging the world an atom at a time in 2000, storing encyclopedias on the heads of pins to be read by electron microscopes._

_Now look where we are._

When he comes back, half-starved and fighting pneumonia, Yuuri is there to smile reproachfully. His past self is not so different from the present. _Did you find what you were looking for?_

They circle around each other endlessly, two souls entwined. Victor, back then, ignorant of the forces he’d someday twist to reshape the world, simply smiles: "Yes."

“I have something to show you, too,” Yuuri says. “It’s in Sector 8.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> to keep the chapter lengths somewhat even, i've split it into two parts. this is part 1, lethe, and we will finish with memories of the past in part 2, styx. these two chapters should completely explain what happened to victor & yuuri in the past, and why they each are the way they are now, so bear with me! 
> 
> i've also updated the chapter count with my current best guess of how much more we have to go. i won't be completely done by halloween, but i'm going to keep trying to do an update a week to carry us into november! if you are a particular nerd about physics or the idea of nanomedicine, you can read feynman's talk, referenced by victor in this chapter, [here.](https://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/feynman.html)

**Author's Note:**

> this fic is my halloween challenge to myself, based on votes people made for prompts on tumblr! the title is influenced by hozier's song [shrike.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWLqdAJbu0A)


End file.
